General Custer 379 How Is It a Commentary on Western Art Andy Warhol

The artist challenged ideas of masculinity but cruel short of addressing racism

In 1986, the year before he died, Andy Warhol produced "Cowboys and Indians," a portfolio of prints commemorating the American West. Featuring almost psychedelic silkscreens of Theodore Roosevelt, George Custer, Geronimo and others, the series puts a historical spin on Warhol's trademark celebrity fixation. Warhol skewers some heroic, heteronormative myths, offer a more satiric, queer interpretation. Just he fails to fully address the mythological frontier'southward racism or his ain cribbing of indigenous iconography.

A recent exhibition and book, "Warhol and the West," revisits "Cowboys and Indians," exploring Warhol'south lifelong fascination with the region. The book also suggests that Warhol's entire Western oeuvre – three decades of films and prints – is an do in paradox. Even every bit he enshrines his subjects' nobility, he can't resist fluorescing them into campy icons. It'south an approach that perhaps only an outsider – a gay artist from New York City – would attempt. The result challenges typical Hollywood notions of masculinity and the West, even equally its naive romanticism furthers the exploitation of ethnic people.

Essays in the book'due south starting time section trace Warhol's interest in Western themes – the creative person wore cowboy boots virtually every twenty-four hours – while grappling with his appropriation of indigenous fine art. The 2d one-half reproduces Warhol's Western work, along with brief responses past artists, academics and curators. The result is a kaleidoscope of thoughtful, erudite and sometimes personal commentary almost an artist whom I thought had long ago exhausted fresh takes.

Warhol's appropriation of indigenous iconography comes under particular scrutiny. A senior curator at Oklahoma City'south American Indian Cultural Centre and Museum, Heather Ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw), situates the artist in a long tradition of white men who misrepresent, exploit or otherwise caricaturize indigenous people. Photographer Edward S. Curtis, whose xx-volume "The Due north American Indian" was published betwixt 1907 and 1930, is a prime example. Warhol's Western prints, Ahtone observes, cater to "a society that wants a credible history that it can at present ain, even at the expense of those whose bodies are at present fodder for visual commodification."

"Cowboys and Indians" was commissioned past a New York art dealer and an investment banker, and its commercial roots lend information technology an uncomfortable dissonance. Gloria Lomahaftewa, a project manager for the Hopi Cultural Preservation Role, and Daryn A. Melvin, who works for the vice chairman of the Hopi Tribe, annotation that Warhol's vivid, almost electric prints of katsina dolls fit into a pattern of sacred tribal objects desecrated by not-Native American artists, who paint the dolls "with vivid colors, effectively erasing and/or distorting the figure'southward meaningful and sacred origin." Today, the Hopi Tribe asks that any institution planning to manufacture or display materials related to Hopi civilisation consult with it starting time. In 1986, though, Warhol depicted katsina dolls without tribal oversight, selling the prints as office of a larger portfolio that retailed for $15,000.

Simply Faith Brower, a curator at Tacoma Art Museum, said Warhol offers a template past which to critique colonialism, mass culture, sentimentalizing nostalgia, racism and injustice. In i of the volume's most intriguing essays, she surveys the influence that Warhol and Pop Art have had on Native American and not-Native American artists, including Knuckles Beardsley, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Maura Allen, Billy Schenck and Alison Marks.

If "Warhol and the Westward" offers an overdue critique of Warhol'southward appropriation and commodification of indigenous cultures, it's less rigorous in connecting his sexuality to his subversion of macho Western tropes. The 1963 print "Triple Elvis," for case, has an obvious homoerotic subtext: Elvis stands with legs apart, pointing a gun, the ultimate phallic symbol, at the viewer, his triplicate legs intertwined and his complimentary hand suspended in an well-nigh masturbatory gesture. Likewise, in Warhol's rendering of John Wayne, the openly homophobic role player cradles a gun cocked toward his mouth.

Warhol'southward films, also discussed, are maybe more unabashed in their queering of Western clichés. In "Lonesome Cowboys," an ultra-low-budget 1968 film, a gang invades a frontier town on horseback, wreaks havoc and then splinters apart. Shot on location in Tucson, Arizona, the movie features Warhol superstars Viva, Taylor Mead and Joe Dallesandro gamely improvising anachronistic dialogue. (At one point, ii cowboys resolve to quit hell-raising and showtime a family unit before Globe War I.) The picture show ends with two desperadoes riding off into the dusk, bound for California, where they plan to become surfers.

"The production of 'Lonesome Cowboys' allowed Warhol and his bandage to play out a fantastical idea of life on the Western borderland unfettered past social constraints – to be heroes in a world in which they were decidedly outcasts," the critic Chelsea Weathers writes in "Warhol and the West," implying that Warhol's own queerness underlies his revisionism.

"Everybody has their own America, and so they accept pieces of a fantasy America that they recollect is out there, simply they can't come across," Warhol one time wrote. "Warhol and the W" suggests that the artist's rendition of history was unabashedly queer – and, despite its colorfulness, unmistakably white.

Buy the book

For more information about "Warhol and the West" by Heather Atone, Faith Brower and Seth Hopkins, visit Maria's Bookshop at

https://bit.ly/2T6WfvQ

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Source: https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/review-how-andy-warhol-painted-the-west/

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